Fading
by Rayndrop
Summary: There is a forfeit to be paid when you offer yourself to another. He is paying that forfeit now: a slow decay into nothing, a rest he's so ready for. Then she's back, asking things of him again that, this time, the broken creature he is can't provide.
1. Hydrangeas

It was in the garden that he first realized it. Amid bowers of hydrangeas that would never wilt, Jareth stood very still and felt the hydrangeas endure. He felt it quite distinctly, like a breeze that blows forever with the same strength in the same direction. He felt himself, and how still he was standing. And Jareth understood that he was going to die.

He tilted his head back and laughed for a long time.

***

You have to yield a certain amount of ground in order to offer yourself wholly to another person, no matter what you ask for in trade. You have to, by necessity, surrender part of who you were in order to change for someone else. When you tailor your soul to fit a need, you're not guaranteed back the parts you trimmed off. You're not guaranteed that the need will last.

How could he not change, in the face of all that shining human will? When his heroine required a villain, how could he not fill the role? It felt as though he had been waiting his entire life to fill it. He had played it to the hilt, an adversary pulled right from her fairy stories. He had played it with fervor and delight, had been ruthless and cunning, determined with all his strength to win. And then, like any fine villain, he had fallen.

What happens to a storybook character when the story is finished?

***

He only went back to the gardens once or twice after that. His appearances in the throne room, too, became more and more sporadic, and then stopped altogether. Instead he stayed inside the castle, never leaving, seldom being seen by his subjects. He roamed among the rooms, seeking out the oldest and sturdiest things and the things that most reeked of magic, and laying his hand on them.

Often he simply stood in the middle of some echoing corridor, with his eyes closed as though he were listening to a beautiful bit of distant music. His hands would be open by his sides, and he would wear one of the small, ironic smiles that suited his mouth so well. It was intoxicating, the feeling of the life passing from him, the essentiality seeping away unnoticed by the eternal, indifferent castle stones.

The goblins did not notice either. They, too, were eternal in their way—flimsy creatures, nameless and numberless and cackling, filling up the corners like dust balls, hard to say from where. And though none of their misshapen little faces were ever alike, they were none of them much different, so that they were always the same goblins through the days and nights and years and centuries and millennia. Jareth, now, was a wisp, a thing that would fade and not be renewed.

He dropped away and they filled in the hole he had left.

Eventually the infinity of the place got to be too much for him. It reached the point where it was hard to catch his breath sometimes, with all that forever bearing down. He had enough magic in him for one more flight. He took it. He folded himself up into an origami of white feathers and, with no bags to pack and no one to inform of his departure, simply soared out of the window, like a sick animal going into the wilderness to find its deathbed.

***

His wings gave up on an Aboveground city street, in front of an old but respectable apartment building. The landscape was made of metal and cement—nothing green, nothing that could renew itself. And all around him were human lives, short and intense and beautiful as fireworks.

Jareth closed his eyes and breathed deeply. If dying alone had been thrilling, dying to an accompaniment of death was doubly so. He was rushing through the hourglass with a million million other grains of sand. It was delicious. This was what he wanted; this was a fitting end for the storybook. Languishing on a shelf would never suffice. Gathering layers of dust and despair, replaying old scenes and second-guessing choices, knocking over furniture and menacing the shadows in the corners—that would never do.

No, this was exactly right. He sat down in the middle of the sidewalk and closed his eyes. Then he flickered into a spot in the corner of the eye, a trick of the light over a hot sidewalk, and, with the daily life of the street hurrying unnoticing around him, the Goblin King settled in to listen to himself decay.

Leaves fell, and then snow. It fell evenly under his crossed legs, and was neither crushed nor melted by the vapor of his almost-presence. He, however, melted steadily. Externally, Jareth remained looking the same as he had when he sat down (or he would have if anyone could have seen him). Inside him, bits and connections broke down and confused themselves. Once he suddenly remembered, with absolute clarity, the pattern of cracks in the ceiling above his castle bed. Then he just as suddenly forgot, and could not recall it again, no matter how he tried. Another time, he began, without any reason or warning, to weep. On a third occasion, he very plainly caught the scent of hydrangeas.

He stopped noticing when or whether the snow fell or melted. He was not afraid.

***

What happens to a character in a storybook that is pulled, half-charred, from the fire?

Of course it was her. When he heard that voice behind him, it lifted his heart with involuntary gladness just before all his peace shattered.

"Goblin King."

Did she know, could she realize that she spoke with the same voice as she'd used to strike him down?

He said nothing. He did not open his eyes.

"What are you doing here, Jareth?"

It was a calm, recitative voice, that of someone who was willing to begin something because she knew how it would end. He understood what that was like, so he did not grudge her the tone, despite how it cut.

"I am dying," he answered in the voice of wry sincerity she expected from him, even though he had forgotten that she'd asked a question. "And it is very rude of you to interrupt, Sarah." He did not intend to say her name; it said itself.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she snapped. The calmness had, in the space of a moment, thinned considerably. Jareth could feel her willing him to turn around. He resisted.

"It is supposed to mean exactly what it _does_mean, which is exactly what it says," he replied acidly, like one who understood many things and was not obligated to give any explanation. It had been a long time since the last melting of the snow, and the sun outside his eyelids was bright, but he shivered with cold. "Run along, Sarah." Her name again.

"I'm not a child anymore, Jareth. Don't treat me like one."

Why did they keep saying one another's names? But the words almost made him laugh. No, not a child. Hadn't he seen to that? Hadn't that been the point of the whole exercise?

"I didn't say you were," he said airily. He wanted to say _Please go away,_ but she did not expect 'please' from his lips, would not understand it.

"What do you want?"

Jareth opened his eyes. It was ridiculous, this dance of questions and answers. It was a script. He could not manage scripts and roles anymore; the bottom had fallen out of the place where he had once kept them. He rose to his feet and turned finally to face her.

"What do I want?" he burst. "What am I doing here? I could ask it of you just as easily! Once again you seek me out and then act as though it is I who have imposed myself upon you. What makes you so certain you are part of my business here or anywhere else?"

Her eyes flashed. "Don't play stupid," she spat. Her face was so distorted with fury that it took him a few moments to notice that it was different—it was longer, less cherub-cheeked, and he did not tower over her as much as he used to do. No, he thought, she was not a child. Sarah flung a pointing finger at the building behind her. "That's my apartment building! You show up one day sitting on the sidewalk in front of where I live and tell me you're dying and try to pretend you had no idea?"

The corners of his lips curled slowly upward. He turned his eyes up to the great, gray face of the building.

Of course, he thought. He said it out loud. "Of course." He laughed then, a hollow, clanging peal, as bitter as wormwood.


	2. Wine

She did not love him.

He knew that there were thoughts more relevant to the situation—certainly thoughts far more groundbreaking—but as Jareth looked up at the apartment building that loomed behind the woman he worshiped, it was somehow the only thought his mind could produce.

She did not love him, he thought, as though something about the flat expanse of concrete and plate glass communicated this truth in a fresh new way. She does not love me, he silently informed a smoke-gray pigeon flying by. She does not love you, the pigeon agreed with a flap of its wings. The cracks in the asphalt street, the weeds growing out of the curb, the checked curtains visible in one apartment window, every part of the whole dying world around him echoed the same truth that she did not love him, she did not love him, she did not love him.

She did not love him.

He looked back down at her.

_You do not love me,_ he meant to say. Instead he said, "I am thirsty."

Sarah's rage buckled for a moment under the sudden weight of confusion. "What—?"

"I used to have the most incredible wine cellar," he found himself telling her conversationally. "There were five entire racks of antediluvian vintages. I even had a few bottles from the vineyards of the Garden itself."

He hadn't been thinking about a drink at all, in fact, before he'd said he was thirsty, but now he could taste the wine, actually feel its sweet coolness sliding down his throat. Involuntarily he ran his tongue over his lips, as though to catch a drop he'd missed. Then the taste and the feeling were gone, just like that, and his mouth had never felt so sour and dry.

"I am very thirsty," he murmured again. After a moment his eyes refocused on her, and he smirked darkly.

"I told you I was dying," he said. "It's nobody's fault but your own if you didn't take me seriously. Don't look so baffled."

He prepared to turn away from her again. But Sarah's thin hand floated upward between them, seemingly on its own volition, open toward Jareth, and it made him freeze where he stood. Her eyes were bewildered, and slitted against the strangeness of his words as though it were a blinding light.

"You… you're so pale." It was impossible to judge her tone—alarm, wonder, concern, suspicion. Her brows puckered in a small, quick little movement, and she stared at him almost questioningly. Her raised hand hovered in the air. Jareth remained a moment, stock still, held by the magnet of that hand. Then he jerked backward, out of its pull, with a snarl and a black look. The hand snapped closed, and retreated to her chest.

"Is that sympathy, Sarah?" he sneered. "Very sweet of you, I'm sure. I have to say, however, that it would have been more appreciated when you were backing me up against a wall as I begged for my life." For just a splinter of a moment, he thought she almost looked conscience-stricken, which gratified him.

Then her eyes flashed as they had before, now with defiance and steely anticipation. The closed hand balled into a fist. And Jareth felt, as strongly as he had so long ago, her bright, bright will reaching out to him. He felt exactly what she expected from him, exactly what she needed him to be. With a clarity like the taste of the wine on his tongue, he felt how lost she had become once more, how much she wanted to be able to fight her way out of her lostness, how much she longed for a clear-cut adversary to best, again.

He felt how naturally that adversary could be him. He saw how reasonable it was that he would hunger for revenge. He saw a dozen different ways he could try to hurt her. He even saw the perfect self-deceit, how he would convince himself that this time he would surely either destroy her or have her for his own.

She did not love him.

He trembled with the need to be needed by her for anything at all. He had misplaced the map to his heart, and there were holes in all of its walls now anyway. He did not know where within him to start seeking that need for revenge; he could not quite understand why it was important.

He felt very tired. He felt he should like to sit down.

"I can't be your villain anymore," he told her simply. Sarah laughed, an almost inaudible snort of disdain.

"Good to know your martyr complex is still in full working order."

He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly back and forth like a pendulum.

"No, Sarah, I mean it very literally. You are looking for a villain, and I am unfit for the role. I have nothing to threaten or tempt you with. I am…" but he was still himself, still in some form or another the Goblin King, and "I am too weak" was not something he could say.

"I am sorry," he finished. "I am sincerely sorry." Why should he be? He was not sorry, he was angry. He was angry because he'd been her villain once already, and that was supposed to make her love him, and it hadn't worked, she did not love him, she did not love him.

He was angry with her, yes, but he was also sorry. He was angry with himself for being sorry.

There was a long pause.

"You said you were dying."

"How good of you to remember."

She crossed her arms and rubbed them as if she felt a draft. "What of?"

The phrasing was so ridiculous he had to laugh. What of. As though she expected him to say "pneumonia."

"What you like, I suppose," he said. "Idealism. Poor judgment. Heartbreak." _You, _he said without speaking, and if she heard it she made no indication. He would have liked for her to wince. She didn't, only continued acting restless and unsatisfied.

"And I was rather enjoying myself," he added after it was clear she wasn't going to reply, even though 'enjoy' seemed like the wrong word. "So if we're quite done here?"

She still said nothing, so he turned and sat back down on the sidewalk, crossing his legs. His eyes closed, but he knew the truth already. He was not going to get it back, that willingness to fade. He was probably never going to get it back again. Not while Sarah Williams was lost and aching and frustrated. Not while Sarah Williams stared at the back of his head, waiting for him to turn back around.

Not while Sarah Williams.

"Or," he said, without opening his eyes.

Behind him, he heard Sarah listening.

"Or," he repeated, "I could continue the whole fascinating process somewhere else. If you feel like coming with me."

"And why would I feel like doing that?" she asked crisply.

"Because," said Jareth, "you don't want to go back up to that apartment."

The silence lasted for what seemed like a long time. A car drove by. He heard the scuff of her shoes as she turned away.

Wait, he called. Wait, Sarah. She took no notice. The door of the building clunked closed after her.

It was not until much later that he realized he had only called out to her in his thoughts.

***

***


	3. Stars

AN: Sorry guys--school and then NaNoWriMo abducted me. There will NOT be another delay like that since I now have it ALL WRITTEN, I just have to feed it to my beta reader :)

.

...

.

It was a long night that he spent on that sidewalk, waiting for her to come out again. Leaves fell, and then snow. Stars were born, and burned, and collapsed. Clocks stopped. Civilizations crumbled. And Jareth slowly dissolved, and prayed for the dawn.

He was perfectly aware that he was losing his mind. It did not strike him as a matter of great importance. He did, after all, hail from a place where reality was so unstable that "mad" was a term without meaning.

The only thing that counted was that he live long enough to see her come out of that building. So Jareth waited, and the sun swept around the sundial and, finally, rose.

Sun. Remarkable how quickly he'd gotten used to that. Or not so remarkable. After all, there'd been light where he'd come from. But there hadn't been any death, and he'd gotten used to that quickly enough, hadn't he?

The apartment building's front door opened.

"There is no sun in the Underground," he said, because it was crucial for her to know this, she needed to know this now or how would she ever understand anything else later? She did not pause. He opened his eyes without having remembered closing them.

"There is no sun," he repeated, "just a great light that is called nothing and comes from nowhere." But by then he already knew. She passed by without even the acknowledgement contained in stepping around him. She was in front of him now, walking away, her skirt flicking slightly about her knees as she went. Beneath him Jareth felt the chill of smooth, undented snow.

"There is no moon," he said to the hem of her white skirt. He felt as though he were floating, upward and back, watching her grow farther and farther away.

"But there are stars," he said, "there are stars, Sarah, that shine like need." She was so far away now, a speck disappearing down the street far below, that he was no longer even hoping she would turn around. He did not close his eyes, even when she had gone. But he did not see the street in front of him; all he saw were clouds, clouds, white clouds flicking subtly in a breeze that blew gently and forever.

***

The tankard in the throne room ran out of ale. The one or two unusually industrious goblins who went to retrieve another did not come back, so no one else tried. The old tankard met much the fate as the throne--clambered over, gnawed on, and draped with goblins and debris until it was beyond recognition or remembrance of its original function.

The same thing, too, was happening to the Labyrinth. It had ceased to be a thing that was a trick and a snare, and become a thing that simply was. No one tried to traverse it any longer—even the goblin patrol guards ceased their burbling meanders through its winding paths, instead settling in guard houses, vine-covered crannies, or just on particularly comfortable-looking flagstones in the middles of paths, and forgetting that they had ever once been prone to movement.

The spaces between nights became shorter. Or maybe it was just that the days were less bright at either end than they had been; it was hard to say. The stars, however, made up for the lost light by shining with even greater fierceness than before. Sometimes one blazed so strongly that it would burn through the hook that hung it in the sky, and streak, glimmering, to the ground.

Presumably they continued shining just as brightly, but that was anyone's guess, really, once the clouds moved in. The clouds carpeted the sky of the Underground, thick and white and heavy. Below, goblins shivered and sunk deeper into their hiding places.

Snow fell.

***

The edge of the sun's disc was almost touching the horizon when Sarah reappeared. The clouds had been ignited orange by the sinking light, and her white skirt, too, glowed like a candlewick. Jareth had never closed his eyes again, nor even blinked, and though most everything shone with the light of summer sunset, the image of Sarah moving up the sidewalk cut through his rheumy, addled vision as a silhouette emerging through fog. Her expression was grim and guarded before he could even make it out clearly. Neither said a word as she approached; she stopped at last but two paces away from him,

"You're back," she said.

"As are you, he said calmly and without a pause. "The difference is that I never left."

The stars were already coming up in the east end of the sky, behind her; he could barely see them, but he could hear them singing. From Sarah, however, there was nothing but silence.

"Your stars are so dim as to appear sick," he told her. She took a step to his side, and his breathing stopped as he thought she was going to go indoors. But she did not. Instead she turned halfway around and looked at the stars along with him.

"They're not my stars," she said after turning around, as though she'd needed to confirm it first. Then she went suddenly quiet again, apparently in embarrassment in what she saw as a somewhat ridiculous disavowal.

"No," he agreed. "They aren't." Her stars were below their feet, the ones he'd written his love into long ago. He also went quiet, watching the stars and listening to their feeble music. Sarah watched them as well, so closely that it almost seemed that she, too, could hear them, that her gaze touching his could have conducted the loveliest strains of his madness into her own whole, human mind.

Jareth tried to pretend, for just a moment, that she understood. But he was no good at pretending. What use was pretending to someone who juggled carelessly over his knuckles all the possibilities in the universe in fragile crystal spheres? All the possibilities, of course, except her.

"You're not even worth it anymore," he told her, weary to his bones. Her dark eyebrows, like strokes of ink from a brush, tilted upward in question.

"Is that so?" she asked dryly. "Only go in for fourteen year olds, I suppose?"

He couldn't keep himself from rolling his eyes. "Oh, Oberon, no," he grimaced. "Who would fall for a teenager on purpose?"

Sarah smirked faintly, and then crossed her arms. "Why, then?" Jareth's gaze clouded.

"You used to tell… the most incredible stories," he murmured, looking at the sky. She looked startled and peered at him curiously, but he did not see. "They were old, old stories. True stories—I'd been there when they happened, I saw them told with faces and bodies and ice and fire. But they were never more real… never more real than when you told them, when I watched from outside your window and listened to you recite them to your mirror." He tilted his head back, his eyes hooded but not quite closed. "When you told them, they were different, Sarah. They were more true than they'd ever been."

He shut his eyes, opened them again, lowered his head to see the little stars singing near the horizon. He turned toward her. Her expression was unreadable.

"Do you tell stories anymore, Sarah?" he asked. "Do you even remember them? Do you even remember how?"

She watched him closely. She did not answer—he did not expect her to.

"Is there anything left of you?" he finished, but the satisfaction was dulled by the momentary surety that it was not he who had said this last, but her, and the momentary unsurety of how he would answer.

"Good night, Jareth," said Sarah. She turned around and went inside.

The night is not good, he declared silently to whatever of this moribund reality would listen. The night is never good. It is far too dark, the night, and the clouds hide all the light of the stars without muffling a note of their music.

The stars sang on. They sang and shone into the tangled passageways of his mind until his ears rang.


	4. Fog

Those who left the Labyrinth first were the ones with somewhere to go. They packed small bags, shut their front doors one last time, and ducked quietly into the shadowy margins of the actual, leaving nothing but the cold wind to take up the places where they'd once stood.

Others left after them, strange and varied creatures with strange and varied faces, hunched into their fur or with thin cloaks bundled around their shoulders. Snow frosted them, cruel snow not quite cold enough not to stick together, not to heap on things. It froze shaggy hides into matted, ice-crusty shells, it condensed breath into stinging frosty glazes over lips and whiskers. In little groups of twos and threes, they shuffled off to the corridors between reality, looking for a new story that needed them.

Some of them stayed behind for a long, long time, huddling deeper into the hiding places they had found—grottoes, burrows, dungeons, houses. Heavier and heavier the snow fell, and farther and farther into their nooks did the goblins and trolls recede.

The weight of snow on snow packed earlier drifts hard and solid; doors and windows were lost to a white carapace of unyielding glacial ice. Outside, only the very tops of the labyrinth walls and the roofs of goblin houses could be seen protruding above the mountains and glens of snow. Inside, the creatures shook with cold, and drew themselves closer and closer inward. One at a time they vanished into themselves, disappearing to the dark places they had been before they were.

Once the very last tiny breath absented itself from the caverns beneath the ice, the snow stopped. The clouds stayed, blanketing the sky with a perfect uniform gray-white, but no wind blew, nothing moved.

There was no longer night. There was no longer day. There was only a dim, uniformly gray-white, vaguely matutinal light that lit the rolling expanse of snow with eerie shines and shades.

In all of the Underground, there was not the smallest sound.

***

The first night knowing Sarah was sleeping nearby had been despairingly leaden. The second night escaped Jareth's fingers like handfuls of smoke. He found his mind, so recently empty of everything, was full of things, too full. It was not quite right to call them "thoughts" when they swum past his eyes so devoid of any of the form or color of a thought. But _things_ filled his mind, that for certain, things such as hydrangeas and wine and clouds and Sarah, oh Sarah.

She is not worth it anymore, he reminded himself, but he could no longer remember why. Because she does not love you, he recited, but it was as though he were reading lines from a poorly written script.

When had she ever loved him? What was it he was determining her worthiness of if not his attempts to gain her love? So, then. And he thought he almost had it—but the moon was rising in the sky. The things in Jareth's mind moved so much slower than the racing moments of the night, and he could not grip a one of either.

Of course what he meant must be that there was no reason. It struck him as absurd, that he would consider her unworthy of anything. Was she not the meaning to everything he did, after all? Was she not why he had come here? But that was not right. There was something about that which was not right. He had come here because…

He had come here, surely, for her. There was no other reason for his appearance upon her sidewalk, and there never had been. He had come here to finish their story as it was meant to be finished. She had been his princess, once. She would be his princess again. He would win her heart, as heroes always won their ladies' hearts in stories like the ones that Sarah told. And Jareth knew he was a hero, because he knew he was a King, a king of somewhere, and kings and princes were always the heroes.

The moon sank in the sky now, and Jareth took up fistfuls of his hair, for he was yet so far short of the answers he needed. How could he win her?

He had the vague recollection that he had somehow, already lost her once, and little though he cared to think about that, it had to be addressed. He would have no hope of gaining the woman he loved if he did not first know what it was she wanted or did not want from him, and how he might still, all grace forbid, fail.

Yet Jareth could not remember how he had come to lose her. The stars were disappearing, now, from the sky, and still he could not remember. He shook his head furiously and wept tears of frustration. The tears bothered him, because he realized that he was not, until lately, one who wept. And this in turn bothered him, because of all the kinds of people in the world to be, what does it mean to be the kind of person who does not weep?

But he felt the farce of it, that Jareth, the King of something, would sit on a sidewalk and shed tears. This was not right.

So many things were not right.

What had he come here to do?

The sun rose.

***

Fog covered everything.

It was all Jareth's clouded eyes could see, it was all the pale morning sun had to illuminate for him, a dim, gray-white fog that seemed to be as much within him as without. Fog hung a handsbreadth from his face, and extended as thick as cotton wool for as long as days. Jareth waited in the fog, he did not know for what, and he leaked out of himself into a pool on the sidewalk which evaporated then into more fog.

A dark silhouette came presently forward, and the mist within him brightened like a sun had emerged from a cloud.

Sarah, his heart said. But the dark shape passed through him and past him without resolving itself into a face or a voice.

There was silence.

She does not love me, he said to the fog, without being able to remember what the words meant.

A smoke-gray pigeon flew out of the fog and alit on the gray-white sidewalk in front of him.

She does not love you, the pigeon agreed.

I am tired, Jareth said. I need very much to sleep.

I will tell you stories, said the pigeon, until you do.

It opened a book—he did not wonder where the book had come from—and began to read aloud. He did not quite understand the story the bird read. He knew it had a princess, and a hero who won her love. He thought after a moment that he recognized it, and he listened closely, but his broken mind jumbled the words on their way to his heart.

Read it again, he asked the pigeon when the story was finished. The pigeon turned the book over, and opened the front cover, and began the story over. The princess and her hero had different names this time, but the story was the same, and it slid through Jareth's grasp in the same way.

Again, he said, his face creased in the pain of trying to remember. The pigeon kept turning the book over and reading it to him, over and over, telling the same story. In every retelling the names were different, in every retelling the heroine conquered her travail and the hero his, in every retelling they both ended with smiles of love on their lips and a whole bright ever after spread before them. At last Jareth smiled happily, and his face uncreased.

It is my story, he said to the bird with relief. The hero is I. It is my story as it was meant to end.

No, the pigeon replied. It is not your story.

Jareth grew agitated. Tell me my story then, he said. Tell me my story as it was meant to end. Before everything went wrong.

The pigeon took out a new book, and began to read. The princess was there, and the travail, so at first he listened with triumph, because clearly the bird was wrong. But as it continued to tell the story, his triumph faded, for though he waited patiently, legs crossed before the pigeon like a schoolboy before his tutor, the hero did not appear.

There was only a villain, lonely and grasping, ruthless and cunning, determined with all his strength to win. He threatened and tempted the princess; the princess resisted; and then, at the very end, the villain died.

Read it again, said Jareth. You have not read it properly. That is not how my story ended.

That was how it was meant to end, said the smoke-gray bird.

Read it again, said Jareth.

I cannot, the pigeon said. It was growing less gray and more white, as the fog around it was growing less white and more gray. It has no more tellings, it said. It should have been told with a thousand more names, but it dies for this one. And now there was no pigeon, and the book was in Jareth's hands, as though he had been holding it all along, and he saw that there was only one word written in it, over and over on every page.

Sarah, the book said.

Jareth leapt up from where he sat.

It is a good name to die for, he growled, and with one mighty wrench of cover and cover, tore the book in half.


	5. The Last Page

AN: The last chapter! (Don't worry, there's a short epilogue. I wouldn't be that cruel! X3) Thanks you guys for your kind reviews! And I should have said this last chapter, but thanks to TinaAlsGirl for betaing from chapters 3 on. INTERNET COOKIES AND LOVE.

.

...

.

After the snow came the earthquakes.

Some split the ground like an axe splits wood, making great, dark crevasses into which the topmost, uncongealed snow crumbled and fell. Some heaved up great slabs of earth and ice into the sky, forming brown cliffs and brown gorges and great sheer faces of brown rock, all shot through with streaks of blue ice where underground springs, and oubliettes that had filled with trickling half-melted snow, had frozen solid.

The Labyrinth's pathways and hiding holes, and all the structures of the Goblin City, splintered under the force of the quakes, leaving nothing but rubble and dust buried beneath the snow. Stones fell from the castle towers, stones fell from the castle parapets, stones fell from the castle walls. The throne and the ale keg toppled and cracked; the wine cellar—its floor puddled with fine wines from bottles cracked by the cold—caved in.

When the quakes stopped, there was finally nothing left of the Labyrinth. There was no whisper that fates had ever been decided in this silent, desolate place, no rumor in the broken stones that triumph might have once echoed from them. All that remained of this place of stories was rock and ice.

But the rock and ice was still awake. The rock and ice waited. It waited with the lonesomeness of the dying; it waited with the patience of the not yet dead.

The rock and ice listened—to the world above the clouds, above the stars, above the hooks for the stars, above the ropes for the hooks, above the ceiling of the sky and the great light that was called nothing and came from nowhere.

The rock and ice listened for the last page of the story.

***

When Sarah Williams came walking up the hill to her apartment building that evening, cradling a big paper bag of groceries, Jareth was not there. It surprised her; at the very least, she knew enough to expect such things in threes. But then, expecting things had never served her very well in the case of Jareth.

A thought occurred to her as she laid her hand on the front door, and she jolted. Perhaps he—?

_How good of you to remember._

_What of?_

_What you like, I suppose. Idealism. Poor judgement. Heartbreak._

She stopped and looked around, though she didn't know what she thought she would see. Sarah gave her head a quick shake to clear it. He was probably just off wherever he went in the mornings—he'd simply found something to do with his evenings too. Well, she was glad he'd gone. She bounced the bag of groceries once on her left hip to secure her grip on them, and opened the door. Sarah rode the elevator up to the fifth level, managing with much effort to forget about Goblin Kings, and think only of how much mayonnaise cost now.

When she opened the door, he was waiting.

Sarah gasped, a short, shallow choke of air, and clutched her groceries very suddenly so that her fingers punched through the paper bag. She'd forgotten, in the last three days of having this shadowy, emaciated creature sitting in front of her apartment building, that Jareth could be frightening. He frightened her now.

He sat in her open window, one foot propped up on the sill, one foot dangling outside. A small, ironic smile curled his lips, and his eyes, dull and darkened since his reappearance, glittered now with the hotly burning life of one in the grips of a fatal fever. He was more thin and pale and haggard than ever, his cheeks were more hollow, and those bright, bright eyes shone in ashy-dark sockets.

Gone were his faerie glamours, gone was all his magic, and gone, sickeningly gone, was his grace. The feline agility that had always leant so to his presence and made his every movement a knife was drained utterly dry, now. He reclined in that window, five stories up, not like one who was too in command of himself to lose balance, nor like one who would sprout owl's wings before he had fallen a meter. He reclined with the ease of one who did not care whether he fell, who had made, not just peace with, but an ally of death.

That was why Sarah was frightened.

"Welcome home, dearest," said Jareth. What might have been a purr once was now a rasp so dry it made Sarah's own throat ache to hear it. "How was your day?"

"How did you get up here?" She hadn't meant to whisper, but felt almost that if she spoke louder she might topple him from his perch with the force of her breath.

"Climbed," he answered simply.

"But— " she began. Something made Sarah look at his hands, and only then did she notice that his fingers were bleeding. She abandoned the question, abandoned quickly the thought of his long, white fingers finding holds in rough moldings around windows, unforgiving metal sill edges, sharp-rimmed bubbles in the concrete.

"What… what do you want, Jareth?" she whispered again, bewildered and terrified and suddenly heart-heavy.

His grin widened horribly.

"The same thing I have always wanted," he said. "Your happiness."

"My—?"

"You need a villain again, Sarah," he explained, like a kindly teacher to a small child. "You are unhappy here. Everything has gone very wrong again. You need me to help you make it all right."

"But Jareth—"

"I told you the first day we met again that I could not be your villain anymore, that I had nothing left to threaten or tempt you with," he said, smiling peacefully. "But I realized today… that I was wrong."

Sarah froze. Her cheeks were as white as his, and she held her apartment key so tightly it bit into the flesh of her hand.

"Jareth," she said, and this time it had no sentence or question left hanging. "Jareth," she rasped again.

He straightened up, and turned more fully toward her, tilting his body backward out of the window. Only the precarious hook of one foot and his bleeding fingertips on the side of the metal window casement kept him from tipping out to the long fall beneath. Sarah's right hand rose involuntarily, as though to help stay him from where she stood.

"Do you love me, Sarah?"

She could barely speak in reply. "What?"

"I said, 'Do you love me?'" he repeated. His tone was almost playful, as though it were only her handbag that he was dangling out the window, instead of himself. Sarah could not answer.

"You see, Sarah," Jareth said all but gleefully, "I am the perfect villain, now. I am my own threat and temptation, both in one. Suppose you care—suppose you would be sorry to see me die. I need only let my hand slip and you would have no chance even to tell me so." His fingers twitched on the casement. Sarah squeezed her key.

"Or suppose you don't care," he continued, casually. "Suppose you hate me, and my death would be nothing but gladness and relief. I hold that before you, too! Look how easily your victory can be completed, these many years later." His eyes shone with pride. "Either way, the power is mine, Sarah. However you feel about me, I hold what you most want."

"All right, Jareth," she said, in a voice she tried to make calming and steady. "You do. You have the power. What do you want from me in exchange?"

"It doesn't matter!" he replied with a wide, awful smile. "It doesn't matter. I don't have to make demands anymore. I am the perfect villain. I am the perfect villain, so now you love me, Sarah. Now you have to."

Her eyes pricked. "Is that what you want?" she said hoarsely. "Is that… what you still want?"

"It is what I will always want," said Jareth. "And I have it now. But I cannot relinquish my power, or I will be the perfect villain no longer, and you will no longer love me."

The breath in Sarah's lungs turned to stone.

"Don't," she gasped.

One of Jareth's fingers left the window casement.

"Miss me, Sarah, won't you?"

Another finger.

"Jareth—!"

He smiled a small, contented smile. "And they all," he whispered, "lived happily ever after."

He fell.

***

_Once upon a time._

What happens to a storybook character who fights the ink that writes him?

What happens to a storybook that refuses its last page?

Sarah dropped her groceries. The bag split; a jar of mayonnaise cracked.

_Once upon a time._

He had not seen the shelves, as he waited in her darkened apartment for her return. He had not seen the gilt-edged volumes of old, old stories in new bindings, had not seen the dolls and fairy tales that he might have recognized as having once seen in a young girl's room.

He had not seen the comfortable chair by the window, in arm's reach of the shelf with all the most well-worn stories, had not seen the reading lamp—an apartment that Sarah Williams liked nothing better than to come home to after a long day out.

_Once upon a time._

He had not seen the desk, the computer in the center surrounded on either side with stacks of yellow legal pads, all filled with scribbled stories.

He had not seen the shelf on the wall above the desk. He had not seen the neat line of books, clean and crisp-cornered, all with the name he loved best in bold type on the spines.

_Once upon a time._

A storybook character, Sarah knew, cannot fight his ink. A storybook cannot refuse its last page.

A villain who is meant to die for the sake of the heroine must, eventually, die for her sake. Even if she no longer needs him to. Even if they would, the both of them, rather he live. Even if the storybook must die with him.

Villains, Sarah knew, are meant to die. But storybooks are not.

_Once upon a time_.

Sarah was racing to the window before Jareth had even left it. Her hands slammed the sharp sill edge like a brake, to keep anything more than her head and shoulders from lurching out the window after him. She looked down.

A thousand years passed as he fell.

He should have lived and died for a thousand years yet, under a thousand different names. He should have threatened and tempted and helped a thousand heroines grow. He should have died for a thousand different princesses. That was how a storybook worked.

For the first time that didn't seem like a good enough reason.

_Once upon a time._

It felt like it was her fault, for trapping him, callow child though she had been. If, after meeting her, he could not die for anyone else, who but she was to blame? He was only a character, written to fill a role.

Jareth the Goblin King had loved a Storyteller. As he fell through the air, hair streaming and dirty ruffled shirt fluttering in the wind, Sarah gave him the only gift a Storyteller could give.

"Once upon a time," she breathed down to him, "there lived a prince."

***

The world was absolutely silent as Jareth fell. He heard no sound but the low whistle of air moving past his ears. He looked up at Sarah, leaning so far out the window that she made a silhouette against the star-studded sky.

He smiled. He was glad that the last thing he would see would be her.

Jareth closed his eyes… and vanished through the sidewalk.

***

***


	6. Epilogue

AN: I thank you guys so much for all your great reviews. Really, honestly. Some of your questions and theories pushed me to make a story worthy of them. Because of that, the point and plot changed several times as I was planning and writing it, so I will probably go back and revise the earlier chapters. Thanks again--you guys are why I write this stuff :) And also thanks again to TinaAlsGirl, both for being awesome and betaing and being awesome and acting all honored and gushy, I heart you XD

.

...

.

**Epilogue**

A man awoke on the flat peak of a brown stone bluff. He opened his eyes just as the sun came out through a hole it had burned in the thick, gray-white clouds, and he blinked and shielded his eyes against its light as he sat up. The land the sun shone over was full of brown rock much like that beneath him, and in the gullies and the shadows of the cliffs and gorges were great floes of ice, melting into rivers that flowed in whatever crack or crevasse might pass for a riverbed.

The man's eyebrows pulled together in thought, and he ran a hand through his dark hair.

"Where am I?" he said aloud to the landscape, but he was distracted from his question by the realization that he had never heard his own voice before. That seemed like an odd thing to realize, although he wasn't sure what his basis for comparison was. He stood up.

"I am home," he answered himself, trying out the voice. It was rough, and honest. It had no music in it, but it belonged, he felt sure, to a good man, and that made him glad.

"Who am I?" he asked, since the answer to the first had come so easily.

"I am myself," he replied, but frowned. It was good to be himself, but that wasn't exactly what he was looking for.

"What am I?" he tried again. The man looked at himself for inspiration. He wore simple clothes of fine fabrics—dark breeches, a blue shirt, and a silvery vest, and on his feet were well-made boots.

"I am the Prince," he said. This pleased him. He looked at the world around him with new interest, now that he was Prince of it. He noticed for the first time the pickaxe and shovel on the ground behind him, and he took them up, one in each hand. They were heavy, but his arms were strong, and the tools felt good to hold.

"I am the Prince!" he declared to the enormous sky and the last fleeting shreds of cloud. Already the face of the brown earth was being frosted by sprouting grass. And as he watched the landscape, he saw, moving out from the shadows, animals, and creatures not quite animals, and a variety of fantastical peoples.

In some of their faces glowed cleverness and mischief, but in none of them meanness or evil. They were all new beings, like he was. He was brand new. The Prince felt a thousand choices in his heart which he would someday have the pleasure of making. He looked over the new land, and although he had never seen a book before, the world seemed to him like an unwritten page.

He tilted his head back and laughed for a long time. Then he went to find someplace to start building his castle.


End file.
